Considering they nearly killed their own drummer by spraying his penis with a "highly toxic" aerosol, consistency was never going to be a defining tenet of Black Sabbath.
While the likes of Vol 4, nicknamed Snowblind by the band owing to the meteorological amounts of cocaine they were consuming in their Bel Air mansion, might have pried a classic from the clutches of chaos, with Ozzy calling it "one of Black Sabbath's best-ever albums," it was always going to be difficult to keep that up.
By 1978, the wheels were coming off, and Ozzy was struggling to pour his orange juice. A weariness had set in, and the group were facing an identity crisis. "We were sick of each other, too," Ozzy told the Guardian while snacking on sausage rolls, "You don't even want to be around your wife all the time and you married her."
But it wasn't just the endless hours that they had spent on the road together that was irking them. They were, to some extent, sick of themselves, too. The whole Sabbath was proving to be a heavy albatross. "None of us wanted to drag this black magic shit around forever so we tried to get a bit modern."
Alas, the result of that experiment on Never Say Die proved that "you should stick to what you know best." In time, it would become a record that the group would revile, with Ozzy literally saying he was "ashamed" of it, and that's a man who once shamelessly beheaded two doves, and that's his lesser-known beheading.
"I think it's disgusting," Ozzy said of the gloopy album. "It was the worst piece of work that I've ever had anything to do with," he added regarding the record that saw him leave the band months later. But he wasn't alone. Geezer Butler also said that Never Say Die was "easily the worst" Black Sabbath album.
"The reason for that is we tried to manage ourselves and produce the record ourselves," Butler said of the band that even a professional team of managers had struggled to manage. "We wanted to do it on our own, but in truth, not one of us had a single clue about what to do. By that point, we were spending more time with lawyers and in court rather than being in the studio writing. It was just too much pressure on us, and the writing suffered," he told Metal Edge.
Simply put, they were doing too much at once - trying to capture every sound that had inspired them, from early Fleetwood Mac to even nabbing Todd Rundgren's arranger, in a bid to reinvent their sound, self-managing, taking drugs, and falling out along the way. The recordings were a mess, and things were manic.
"We were getting really drugged out, doing a lot of dope," Tony Iommi recalls. "We'd go down to the sessions, and have to pack up because we were too stoned, we'd have to stop. Nobody could get anything right, we were all over the place, everybody's playing a different thing. We'd go back and sleep it off, and try again the next day."
In fairness, that had always been the case. Apparently, for Snowblind, according to Butler, their manager had presented them with a startling bill. "Whether you can believe him or not, the record cost, I think, $65,000, and the cocaine bill was $75,000." But they were younger, fresher, and more enthused then. And they hadn't spent years on the road together building up little substance-addled resentments.
So, while it might be a sore spot in the band's discography, not one of them was ever left wondering why. That inevitability might have been enough to kill the original run of the band, but curiously, it's a great measure of their searing originality that the likes of Kim Thayil and Dave Mustaine have both heaped huge praise upon it.